Tarot As A Life Map

Tarot isn’t just a way to predict outcomes, but a clear map for building a life you actually want to live. That’s the premise we dig into on Paranormal Yakker with Janis King—one of the UK’s most respected tarot readers—who takes us from a life-on-the-brink moment to a framework she calls the Life Code, where the Fool holds potential energy, the Magician sets it in motion, and the four suits become practical skills you can train.

Janis shares the story of her first startling reading with a mystic named White Dove in Camden Market, a trance-mediumship breakthrough at Arthur Findlay College, and a channeled collaboration with an entity she calls Obin. Those experiences led her to reimagine the deck’s architecture: cups as emotional literacy and connection, wands as will and direction, swords as clarity and problem-solving, and pentacles not as money, but as currency—our lived, tradable experience. From there, she built a spread that starts with a single Minor Arcana “you are here” card and organizes the next two steps with precision, guided by the Major Arcana as an instruction manual rather than a mythic parade.

We also dive into the surprising resonance between the majors and classical philosophy—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—and why Aristotle’s golden mean visually echoes a path down the centerline culminating in the Sun. For Janis, tarot is open-source wisdom: no gatekeepers, just a global network carrying a shared code from kitchen tables to classrooms. The result is a fresh way to work with energy—less about forcing outcomes and more about dancing with constraints—so you can make changes from the inside out and see them hold in the real world.

If you’ve ever wanted a map for your next two steps—or wondered how to turn insight into action—this conversation is for you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Janice King & Her Path
• 2:10 Life Meltdown And The First Reading
• 4:25 Trance Mediumship Breakthrough At Arthur Findlay
• 7:30 Channeling Obin And Channeled Readings
• 11:26 The Bath Command: Write The Book
• 13:05 Designing A New Tarot Structure
• 16:00 Teaching Catalyst And The Life Code
• 18:10 Pentacles As Currency, Not Money
• 19:55 How The Life Code Differs
• 22:00 A Practical Spread As A Map
• 24:05 Know Thyself And Greek Links
• 27:00 Open-Source Message And Network
• 29:20 Fool And Magician As Energy Coaches
• 32:40 Agency, Dance With Energy, Royals
• 35:00 Takeaways And Where To Find Janice

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest on today's show, Janis King, is one of the UK's most respected& successful Tarot readers. She studied trans-mediumship at the Arthur Finley College in Stansted & advanced mediumship at the College of Psychic Studies in London. I'll be talking with Janis about her book,

Tarot - The Life Code: 0:31

A Fool, A Magician, & the Secret of Life. Janis King, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Well hello Stan, it's lovely to be here. When, Janis, did you first become interested in the Tarot & what was there about it that attracted you to it& led you to not only learning how to use Tarot cards but mastering them? Like a lot of people, I was drawn to Tarot because I was going through a bit of a life meltdown. It's a common story that we get drawn to looking for help when we most need it. So I was not interested really in Tarot at all& in fact even though I have a family history in esoteric stuff, had sort of really rejected it as something that I wanted to get involved in. However, I was very interested in energy & manifestation before the whole secret, before the term manifestation became popular. We're talking cassette tape territory here. So I was given a cassette tape with a manifestation technique on it, didn't know anything about it& it kind of blew my mind because it worked but nothing stuck & I was really frustrating. So I did this big experiment over some years, big experiment which appeared to be monumentally successful for about 18 months & then it fell like dominoes & my life hit the deck. So I was pretty upset about this & did not understand what the hell had happened. I was doing meditation all the way through & what I was trying to do is speak to these fabled guides that were all supposed to have & mine appeared to be stuck on the end of some celestial call waiting line & never answered my call. So I'm like, come on guys! Until one day I did this meditation, a little boy came into the meditation, handed me a white stone egg. I then said, Oh, it's a white dove! & the little boy nodded his head & ran away & again, silence, crickets. Until a few weeks later, maybe a month, I was up in Camden Market in London & saw this shop with Tarot readings in massive letters & thought, Well, do you know what? I'm not getting any answers from anywhere else. Maybe I should have a go at a Tarot reading.& I walked in & the guy behind the counter said when I inquired, pointed to a guy in the back room who had this long white hair & white rose, proper sort of be Jesus character,& he said, Oh, well, you'll need to speak to White Dove. I'm like, Okay, perhaps I do need to speak to White Dove.& White Dove basically did this reading where he basically told me that I was in the middle of a completely... I basically had opened Pandora's box energetically & my life has been taken apart & put back together & I was being moved to a new path & he told me that the next three years were going to be pretty horrendous.& there would be kind of angels, human & energetic alongside the path to get me through& I just went, Well, no. See? No. I refuse. I take it all back. I'm not playing this game anymore. Whoever this is does not get to come into my life & just take it apart. What I'd asked for was, give me what I need to make everything right. & basically said, Well, you asked. But the reading was so bizarre& detailed & just like, Oh, okay. So what is this? So I then, of course, was drawn to finding out more. I wanted to know more. & so I thought, Well, will it speak to me? Can I communicate with this like this? Because I've been looking for a way to communicate?& the other thing I'd asked for in my rantings of the powers that be, because trust me, I did rant at them big time. I ranted& I said, Why does it have to be so hard? Why can't we not just have a map of how to do life? When things go wrong, why don't we just get slapped? It's so unfair& very bad parenting, I have to say. So I asked for a map& this life code system many years later is what that is. & so it's been a long journey& I was in a lot of resistance, Stan, for a long time with that. But it is utterly fascinating.& so here I am on my new path, as told. As stated in my introduction Janis, you studied trans-mediumship at the Arthur Finley College& advanced mediumship at the College of Psychic Studies. Both of them are highly regarded in the world of esoteric studies. How did you apply what you learned at those institutions to your Tarot readings? The experience I had at Arthur Finley was totally transformational & I had been again going through another sort of almost like a mini dark night of the soul. I'd asked for the next stage. Be careful what you ask for, just saying everybody, careful what you ask for. So I'd asked for the next stage because I'd sort of become aware that I plateaued a little bit & I mean gosh did I get it. So basically again everything fell apart. Everybody in my life seemed to disappear in dramatic fashion leaving me very much on my own & I ended up going to Arthur Finley because honestly I didn't know what else to do. There was a whole backstory to that which I won't go into now but I ended up there& I had never done trance mediumship before & I honestly wasn't even convinced that I would be able to do it in to any kind of level. Trance mediumship for those that don't know is where you allow a spirit to use your voice & your body to communicate through you& it requires you to step out of the way& allow that energy to drive the bus as it were. So obviously this is quite an odd thing& I was determined that I wasn't going to force it or try too hard or fake it or be it had to be authentic I was getting nowhere really. I felt that I was getting nowhere in the class. I like to be really honest about this. I didn't feel that I was being successful & so I shared this with my tutor & I said look I'm not going to fake it or push it but you need to know that I'm not really feeling like I'm connecting in. So she said okay so what we're going to do is tomorrow when we do the class I'm going to take the whole class back a bit & I'm going to ask spirit to show you how it feels. I said okay. So there's about 15 of us around in the group when we sat there & my turn came we went take ourselves down into a sort of meditative state a trance state trance mediumship so I can do that I'm good at that& then the teacher said okay so spirit can you step forward& I felt this vibration like static electricity running from the top of my head all the way down my spine to the floor like my whole back of my body felt like it was tingling with static electricity& then she said okay so that's good so we have we have a presence so would spirit would you step forward & what happened next was that I felt something, someone break the boundary into into me. It was like CRICSH& it's one of those moments where you go umm... I'm in trance but it was like it was shocking, oh God what the hell & then I got flooded with the most intense love I think to the point of it being unexplainable& it was overwhelming in its intensity& it just literally flooded the whole of my being from the inside out. It was one of those moments where you're sitting there & even though I'm in trance I'm going oh & then a little voice in the back of my head went don't fight it, this is awesome. So I'm okay leaning in so I just relaxed into it & then after a period of time the tutor said okay thank you spirit would you step back & the reverse happened. It, I felt it leave physically I had actually thought when she said spirit step back would actually be fine you could just leave us here for a few hours I don't need just move on to the rest of the class& that changed things for me & so the advanced mediumship course at the Psychic College was me exploring this further & the life code system came about because I believe that entity was open who became an obvious collaborator in this thing & this new way of looking at Tarot & loads of new connections & massive amounts of synchronicities& ridiculous stuff started to happen & I think that was how that came & then my readings became much more channeled than before. So Obin became a work partner I find the metamorphosis of your book intriguing in that what began as an idea for a new Tarot deck emerged as a way of seeing Tarot through a different lens. Could you take me through the creative process that took you from creating a new Tarot deck to a book that looks at the Tarot in a new way? The whole thing was part of the same process. This all started with a really weird experience, where again, part of this clearing, which once all of a sudden it all just righted itself & husband had a bit of a breakdown. He came back things with everything just fixed itself after this. But before that happened, I was in the bath & laying in the bath quite happily, bit of music playing. & then suddenly this loud voice shouted in my head, like properly shouted to the point where it made me jump, write the book & I'm like, Oh, what? really give a girl some privacy. Come on. So, so I jumped out of the bath because you have to always do what you have to follow. You can't reject. So quick dressing gown on, ran to the laptop & again started typing madly & then after about two paragraphs, silence again, silence with the crickets. What the hell? Nothing. It just disappeared. Like, okay, what was that all about? That was odd. I went over about a week later to my son's flat with him & his partner. We were messing about my son reached Tarot as well. We were messing about on the floor with the Rider Waite deck, some designs board games & we were going, okay, so we're going to turn terror into a board game. How would we do it? & we laid the cards in a circle & then he said, Oh, we need the Guiding Star of Tarot. I said, okay, so how are we going to do this? So he worked out that if you took the Minor Arcana, you could turn them into the points of the Star. & he said, but we've got too many cards in the Major Arcana, so we need to make it 20. So I said, okay, take out the Magician. Just put them at the top. He said, fine, we've got 20 cards. Here's our first point, which is the Suit of Cups. We've got five cards at the bottom of the point. Where do you want them? So I said, okay, put them over from the High Priestess & Lovers that sits nicely. That's sort of the beginning of the process. Fine, what goes opposite Swords? What goes in the middle Wands?& then we have Pentacles at the end & I had no idea.& I could see a vague connection. So when I looked to the points of the Star & I looked to where they were sitting on the Major Arcana, you know what? That kind of works. That's weird. Cups sit over the High Priestess to the Lovers. That makes a kind of sense.& then when I looked at opposite& I looked at Swords& I could see the Suit of Swords, which is very challenging sitting over the Hanged Man to the Tower, I thought, well, energetically that's kind of been tuned as well. Although don't know how every card would work with that, but it seems there is a resonance there.& then the same with the Suit of Wands. This is quite strange. I've never seen this before, but it fits. As for the Suit of Pentacles, Stan, I had not one notion how that would work. I looked at the five cards & the Suit of Pentacles thought, well, I've got no idea. I can't find a resonance. I don't know. But I didn't know there was something here that was worth investigating.& I wanted to see the connections between the Minor Arcana& those Majors. I wanted to see them visually connected because when you do it with the Rider Waite that you can't really see the connections visually& immediately. So I came home& I started kind of just playing with it. & that gave me the idea. What I need to do is I need to create a deck that shows those connections properly. I was still a bit bothered about the last Suit of Pentacles though, because I thought, you know what, I don't know. I don't have all the details on the others, but that one, that's totally in the dark for me. I've got no idea. In the meantime, this is an involved story. In the meantime, my friend, Gail, who had taken me to Arthur Finley, who had told me about it & taken me, rang me up & said, oh, by the way, I've got a Tarot student for you. & I didn't teach at the time at all.& she said, I have this Tarot student& she wants to do an advanced course. I've told her you're going to teach her an advanced course& I've even told her how much it is. So that's what you're doing. & I went, uh, no, what? I'm making a deck. I can't make an advanced Tarot course as well. I'm not going to do it. She went, yes, you are. & I've told her how much it is. & she told me how much she'd quoted her& I said, well, that's crazy. She's not going to pay that. She's totally agreed. Okay. All right. So I basically wrote the course ahead of the student.& I thought, well, you know what? I mean, I'm right. I've got this new thing. Maybe I'll build the course around that. & it was through that process of writing it. Suddenly, all of these new every cards started to make sense.& I wrote the course right the way around to the Suit of Pentacles, which was last.& I was starting to panic, I thought I still don't, how can they teach it if I don't know how it works? Because I really don't understand it at this moment. & as I got to write the course, the Suit of Pentacles realigned itself. So normally in Tarot, we're taught Pentacles is money& work & just kind of mundane life. But in this system, it emerged as the sum of the other three Suits. & instead of being money, it became currency. Currency being our life experience. Currency being experience that we trade with, that we build a rich, abundant life with. I thought, oh my God, that's brilliant.& then when I looked to the five final cards, with that information, everything made sense. & it was perfect in ways that I couldn't even get my head round. It was just perfect. I'm like, oh, thank you. Just in time. But now we get it. Now we have a system which is absolutely flawless. There is nothing about it that is in question or doesn't work.& so all of those things came together. & so the deck fed into me then making this course, which then told me how the system really worked. It was great. In what ways, Janis, does differ from other books that have been written about the Tarot? The life code shows you Tarot as a way of looking at life from above & showing you how to do it. So each of the Suits tells you about you, your emotional life, your will,& your courage & your passion& your creativity & your ability to problem solve& think objectively. It shows you how to use those in the right way, like a recipe, which creates your life experience. & then it gives you the Major Arcana as the instruction manual as to how to bring those potentials to life. So the Troppin Tarot is we have the Fool& the Magician & they are the energetic source. So we have potential energy & kinetic energy. We know that that's a fact in physics. That's energy. That's how we use energy. Potential energy is not affected by its environment. That's the Fool. The Magician's job is to take that potential & turn it into kinetic energy, which is energy in motion, which is now affected by its environment & influenced by it.& the Magician's job is to unpack the potentials in each Suit& bring them to life to create the life experience that you actually want to live. & this is a long term, not a short term process.& it tells you how to use your will, what is creating your emotional experience & how you can change it. & it shows you how you're using your mind & where you're tripping yourself up with your thinking. & then it tells you the experiences you need to bring about in order to create that long term sustainable, abundant, happy life experience. So we're looking at Tarot as a system, not individual cards. I believe you've touched on my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. In case there's another aspect to it. Most people who use Tarot cards do so for divination purposes. You do too, but unlike other Tarot readers, you also use them as an overreaching philosophy & guide system that can be applied constructively to the life of your clients. How is that accomplished? Yes, we can we can obviously we can use Tarot in the way that we've always used it this doesn't negate that at all. But there is a way we can use it so that the book gives you a spread, which if you read Tarot you'll know a spread is a way of laying out cards to get information. But this spread is basically you take one Minor Arcana card, when you're going to use a map. The first thing you need when you use a map is to know where you are. Because if you don't have a you are here. How can you figure out where you want to go. So, your you are here card is one Minor Arcana card & that tells you, in which area you need to be focusing at the moment on your life so whatever Suit that comes up that's the area that most needs your attention.& then you allow Tarot itself to create the reading so it's like Tarot is now going to do the heavy lifting. So if you pick, say, the six of Swords, you're going to lay the seven& eight to the right.& the five & the four to the left. & then above that you'll have a, you'll have the Major in Swords you'll have a Swords Major that tells you how to be how to show up for the energy in what manner& energy, should you be approaching this. The cards to the right will tell you where you're heading next or what you need to contend with the cars to the left will tell you what's built up to this, & what has contributed to the situation. Then you have your Majors, which go underneath you have a designated Major which is your primary guidance which is, this is what you need to be addressing now.& then you have your support system, which is supporting the process which are the two Minors behind that, the two Minors in front of it, a guidance for the road ahead, guidance for these two cards on the right. So what it does is it gives you a like a mini instruction manual as to okay you're here. This is how you manage, this is how you manage the next part of the process. Part of the Tarot story is the Hermit, which is right in the middle of the way we think.& what we do so it's right in the middle of the process, he regulates our will. & what it's saying is, don't look too far ahead, because we're regulating our will here. Only look at your next two steps, because that's the story of the Hermit. He's lit with his lantern& all he can see his next two steps, because that's actually most important. If you start looking right the way down the line you're not going to help yourself & you're going to distract yourself from what you need to be doing now. So your next two steps are what's most important. Do those, then move on to the next two steps. & that's how you make the process. That's why we only take two cards.& then that is our next job. You say, Janis, the Tarot itself is a coded message from spirit to us, an instruction manual for how to live& enjoy a successful life. What are the reasons for you saying that? Some really fascinating kind of resonances came to life. I'm interested in lots & lots of things & I was looking at, it was a course done by one of these Tarot shops in London & the name of the course was Know Thyself. So that's really interesting because that chimes in to kind of what this system is talking about. So I thought, know thyself, what was that? & I looked at,& in fact I think it was Aristotle. So I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I started looking at Aristotle's teaching& what happened in that process was quite amazing because when we look at the three Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, & then Aristotle, we can see their teaching literally in pictorial form in the Major Arcana. So I thought this is too literal for words. & one of the weird synchronicities was my Sun card, is very, very yellow. It's very golden in fact. & I didn't want it to be golden when I was designing the deck because it's within the Suit of Pentacles. What I wanted was it for it to have some green because it's with Pentacles & I felt, well, it should sit within the colour code. But no matter what design I tried, I just wasn't happy with it. So in the end, I thought, I'm going to have to just make my peace with the fact it kind of stands out like a sore thumb& it is just about as golden as it gets. Anyway, it's like your tie Stan. It's that golden, it sort of gleams out. So when I was reading about Aristotle, Aristotle talks about the, what he calls the golden median, which is the key to happiness. & the golden median describes the four cards in the Major Arcana that run down the middle, the end of the Sun.& so what we have is we have the ability to control our emotions& to set good boundaries. We have the ability to regulate ourselves & be self-sufficient & to draw on our own wisdom.& then we have Temperance, which brings us into balance & we don't do anything extreme. Those three cards add up to the Sun. & when you look at Aristotle's teaching, the golden median, that's golden. So it's like right down the middle, we've got exactly that. & it was like, okay, that's really specific, really specific. Now, I could go into lots more of the similarities, but that got me really interested in the fact that, okay, so this has already been said, but thousands of years ago, then I got really interested in versions of the Bible that, you know, probably some of your readers maybe have Neville Goddard & some other people have looked at the Bible, not as a religious text, but as a sort of metaphysical instruction manual. Now, when we look at the Bible from that perspective, the message is the same. It's like, okay, that's interesting. Now we've got a repeating message. So the message that Tarot is giving us is the same message that has been attempted to have been delivered on multiple occasions. Tarot is just delivering it again in a different form. & I asked about this & I communicated with Obin & I asked if this was indeed true & what came back. I hope none of you Christian people shoot me here, but what came back was the message. Well, the Messiah experiment failed. Because the message hasn't been heard.& so what Tarot is, there are no more messiahs. There is only a network & Tarot is a way of getting the message out in a way that can be read by everybody. It is not controlled by anyone. Nobody owns it. Nobody has control over it. It is open source completely.& it has literally found its way under the radar to everywhere in the world, from Azerbaijan to Russia to China to France to America to Stockholm to, oh, I mean, literally everywhere. & everybody can make their own version of it, but the code remains the same.& it is quite miraculous.& if we choose to look at it in that way, it becomes a code of living for the human experience to enable us to make it better. Now, it isn't for the point of being spiritual for the sake of it. The point of it is to make us more effective, happier, to get us operating at a higher level so that we can bring spirit & humanity into closer alignment, which actually is better for both energies. So it's like a co-creation. We help each other, in fact, is what we do. So the message is for everybody. It's not mine. It's not yours. It's not anyone's. It's for us all. & that's why it's called the life code. & that's why it's the secret of life. The standard 78 card Tarot deck has various suits & symbols as well as Major & Minor Arcana cards.

The subtitle of Tarot - The Life Code: 30:29

is A Fool, A Magician,& the Secret of Life. Why Janis do you hold the Major Arcana cards, the Fool, & the Magician in such high regard? Well, because they are the coaches, they are the actual instruction manual. So the Fool & the Magician talk about the way we use energy& energy is everything. Everything is energy. We are energetic beings. Our physical bodies are actually fairly, you know, we're just held together with with electricity& I hope & a prayer really physical. Everything physical is mostly space as we know. I mean, that's not me being woo woo. That's just physics. We know that atoms& electrons & neutrons. So it's there. It's a network & we are electronic & we are magnetic.& so actually, if we take our bodies out of the equation, everything we do in life is energetic. Everything, we attract people to us energetically. Now, whether or not people choose to agree with that or believe in it, I believe in it makes no difference. It is just a fact of life. This is what we do automatically. We all have, we are all connected into this energy, whether or not we choose to lean in& do it consciously or not. The trick is & what I've been fascinated by since the I don't know the mid eighties because that's how old I am is how much control can we have then really? Can we change this? Can we control it? Can we can we alter it? Can we influence it?& it's a tricky old thing. It isn't simple. But yes, we can. We start within us.& so the Fool & the Magician are the archetypes for how we use energy. Then the Fool in the Tarot story is the repository of the four aces which talk about potential because the Fool is the potential of all things, the potential of all energy.& we symbolize that with the four Tarot aces.& the Magician's job is to take those aces & unpack them. That's the Minor Arcana. That's all of the energy unpacked.& then the Royals are how we show up in response to that energetic potential. In what way it & in what part of the process should we tell can we most effectively influence it & engage with it because it's a dance. We can't control it, but we can dance with it. We can work with it. We can't make it bend to our will. But we can operate within it in a way that moves & shapes it& moves it in a direction which is in the direction we want it to go. What, Janis, is your hope that readers of Tarot - The Life Code take away with them after they read it? I want them to see that life is not a mysterious process. Part of my, what I'm passionate about is to show people that we have more power than we think we do.& we are energetic beings. Now look, I'm not going to sit here& tell anybody that it's a simple process. We all know that we're all grownups. We've been through some stuff. But we can, we can make changes& we make those changes by making them within ourselves first because we're doing this. We are the ones. So therefore if we're going to change our external reality, we got to change this first.& Tarot is a great feedback system that we can go, okay, let's go in. If I'm going to lift the bonnet & go into the engine, give me the instruction manual. It's like, those car manuals that we used to get. It's that. So that's what we're looking at. We're looking at what we need to look at within ourselves in order to change our life. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker

want to buy Tarot - The Life Code: 34:49

a Fool, a Magician, and the Secret of Life, learn of other books you've authored, your Life Code Tarot deck, book a reading with you, or take your Tarot course, how, Janis, can they do that? Well, you can do that very simply by wandering over to JanisKing.uk& Janis is spelled like Joplin. So J-A-N-I-S, which I think in the States is more than normal spelling in the UK. It's not spelled like that normally, but that's how it's spelled. J-A-N-I-S King.uk. Very simple. Janis King, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It's been great yakking with you. That's my pleasure, Stan. It was such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for inviting me on.